Power-gating techniques generally involve shutting off or reducing power that is supplied to certain electronic circuit component(s) when such electronic component(s) are not in use, such as in a sleep or standby mode.
Controlling the ON-rush current is one of the challenges with power-gating techniques. For example, some electronic components may not be able to tolerate short-term spikes/increases in supplied current—this high current can become a significant detrimental issue when a power-gate circuit turns ON the power supply to such electronic components, when there may be an initial high level of ON-rush current before the supplied current reaches a lower steady state level.
To address the ON-rush current, conventional power-gate methods/circuits provide dedicated additional delay elements. The delay elements operate to provide a delay for a supplied voltage to ramp up from a lower level to a higher (such as close to or approximately equal to a full operating) level. While the delayed ramping up of the supplied voltage may attempt to address the issue of high ON-rush current, the additional delay cells contribute to power consumption during both active and sleep/standby modes. Furthermore, the additional delay cells slow down the turn OFF speed of the conventional power-gate circuit, such that there is some amount of power consumption during the turn OFF process before the power-gating circuit is able to reduce power to the electronic component(s).